Ok, the suspense is over. This is the greatest film ever made about music, and (possibly) my favourite film of all time.

...Sainte Colombe asks Marais if he finally understands the purpose of music. Marais naively says "God." He's wrong, because "God can speak." Sainte Colombe makes him try again, and Marais goes through an exhaustive list of guesses: love, the loss of love, silence, glory...But he still doesn't get it. Marais begins to well up, admitting he doesn't know. Maybe it's better left to the dead. Sainte Colombe lights up. "You're getting warmer."

This prompts Marais's epiphany: "A little tune for those who can't speak any longer. For lost children. For softening a shoemaker's hammer. For the time before we even lived or breathed or saw the light."

A remarkable meditation on, loss, grief & regret and the intangible power of music.

Presumably many of you have seen it? Its hardly obscure and was pretty big news back in the 90's.

on the other hand, i think the best films about music would actually not be narrative cinema, but art cinema, where images are used more abstractly, rather than to tell a story, ie. images used in the same way as music is played, not bound to narrative necessities and limitations. im struggling to think of a specific example though . or have i just described music videos?

Just saw Straight Outta Compton, which I liked. It tried to talk about a lot of stuff in connection with the group and the sentiments behind the music. Race, crime and its consequences, family, police brutality, the riots, the Compton neighbourhood, wanting to escape it, music as a means to doing that, being the voice of your people, making it big from nothing, money, the music business, people screwing each other over with contracts and shit.

Naturally, it was so busy that it went over all these themes kinda superficially, so you got the basic idea without much nuance. Still a fun biopic with good acting. The scene I liked the most was the NWA members sitting around in a meeting listening to Ice Cube's diss track "No Vaseline" when it came out. Also I had no idea that Eazy E played such a central role in the history of the group. I always thought he was sort of a Old Dirty Bastard kinda character.